Most of these programs use BFD, the Binary File
Descriptor library, to do low-level manipulation. Many of them
also use the opcodes library to assemble and disassemble
machine instructions.

The binutils have been ported to most major Unix variants as
well as Wintel systems, and their main reason for existence is to
give the GNU
system (and
GNU/Linux) the facility to compile and link programs.

Obtaining binutils

The latest release of GNU binutils is 2.25. The various NEWS files
(binutils,
gas, and
ld)
have details of what has changed in this release.